by Judith Tarr
It was best, she told herself. He had to marry in Asanion. He was too loyal in himself; he would never look at another woman while she was there to distract him. If she turned him away from her, even taught him to hate her, then he would look for comfort where it best served him, and surely find it.
She would happily strangle any woman whom he called beloved. But she could not—physically could not—make herself go to him. Even to face him; to lay her hand over his heart, just so, and know the power that slept in him, and know, know surely, that the child of this night would not die unshaped and scarce begun.
No one tried to talk to her. Estarion’s lords and servants were too shy of the priestess-mage or too scornful of the commoner. The guards had no time. The priests had troubles of their own.
That, if she would let it, was cure and physic for her hurt. She had the land-sense—it was the first thing any mageborn child woke to knowledge of, and she had sea-sense on top of it, or water-sense at least. She knew how the earth welcomed Estarion: which was both pleasure and pain, because he had been so sure that it would recoil from him, and because that surety had become a part of her. But something had gone, or was going, awry.
“He’s only partblood Asanian,” she said to the priests and priestesses who had come from Endros, half a cycle’s journey into the Golden Empire, when there was no one else to listen or to intrude. “And we all know what happened to him here. Is he twisting the worldlines, do you think? Or finding them twisted, and tangling them further?”
“If that were all it was,” said Shaiyel, in whom the land-sense was so strong that he could wade in the earth as if in water, “then I could mend it with a word.”
He flushed under their stares. He was young, younger than Vanyi, and almost as pale as she. He kept well out of Estarion’s way. He was half Asanian, and he favored his mother, though his eyes were narrower and his cheekbones higher and his hair straighter than any proper Asanian’s. He never could understand why people thought him arrogant. He was like Estarion in that. He knew what he could do. Why should he pretend that he did not?
“It’s not Estarion,” Iburan said. He lounged on a bench against the wall, great black mountain of a man, dressed with uncommon plainness in the white robe that priests of the Sun wore in this part of the world. His beard was braided but ungauded, and his hair was in a single plait. In a little while they would all attend the sunset-rite in the temple of this city—town, rather, as Asanion reckoned it, smaller within its walls than Endros but thronged with double and treble the people.
“It’s not the emperor,” said Iburan again. “Except that, by living and breathing and walking in this country, he brings it about. I felt something like it when his father came here. Asanion never felt itself joined to Keruvarion in a marriage of equals. It would rule or it would have nothing, no matter the will of its emperors or their blood-right to its throne.”
“But it accepts,” said Shaiyel. “My mother accepted my father, though he was a slant-eyed plainsman. We are all one, she told me. We must be, or the sun will fall.”
Iburan’s smile concealed itself in his beard, but Vanyi felt it. “Not quite the sun that rides in the sky. But the Sun that rules out of Endros—yes, that could fall too easily if the half of the prop beneath it breaks asunder.”
“One would think,” said dour Oromin, “that nigh a hundred years of inescapable fact would impress itself on an empire’s mind.”
Vanyi faded into the shadows. They were saying nothing that she had not heard innumerable times already, and never to any purpose. On a field of battle half-begun, the heir of the Sun and the heir of the Lion, brought together out of all hope, had wedded their two empires. And spent the rest of their lives and the lives of their children struggling to keep that marriage intact.
For a long while, maybe, they had been more successful than not. Then Ganiman died in Kundri’j Asan, and his son all but died taking vengeance.
Emperors in Asanion seldom died unaided. It was the way of their succession. But it was not the Sunlords’ way.
Sunlords were too direct, she thought. They saw the world as a simple place, a pattern of light and dark under the sway of god and goddess. They did not understand Asanian complexities. Even that first heir of the two lands had had his mother’s bright clarity of mind, and too little of his father’s subtlety.
Estarion had no subtlety at all.
No matter what she thought of, she circled back to him. She slipped out of that room full of priests and useless chatter, and sought the way to the gate.
o0o
This was a proper palace, as convoluted as an Asanian’s mind. She lost herself more times than she cared to count, before she found a servant to direct her toward escape. The man was subtly, exquisitely contemptuous. Barbarian, he thought at her, not caring if she heard.
And so she was. She did not thank him: that would have set her below him. But she bestowed on him a coldly brilliant smile.
She was learning the shape and the taste of an Asanian city. Villages in the Isles huddled together above the sea, their faces turned inward toward the well and outward toward the boats and the nets. Towns in the Hundred Realms warded themselves in walls, but under the peace of the Sun they had allowed themselves to go to green, in gardens within, in fields and farms without.
In Asanion the walls were manifold. This town of Shirai had three, and gates so placed that one had to walk far round the circle from one to the next. The streets within the circles were an inextricable tangle of blank walls, twisting turns, sudden squares and crossroads often choked with market booths, or veiled women chattering at a cistern or worshippers thronging into a temple.
Keruvarion had conceded mightily in suffering the worship of the goddess beside the god. Here the thousand gods had yet to diminish their number, for all the truth that was embodied in the emperor.
So many people crowded so close together could never be truly clean. The stench of them flooded Vanyi, all but drowning her. Their roar and seethe swept over her like a storm on the sea.
She was seafolk, skyfolk. She was not made to live in such a place.
A thin thread of discipline kept her on her feet. She was tall here, and slight, borne along like a twig in a millrace. She did not try to fight the current. It fetched her up against a wall that had been the recipient of too many attentions; it reeked like a midden, or like a tavern in the morning after a long carouse.
But there was cleanliness within the wall, and quiet. She worked her way round to the gate. It was shut but not locked. It opened to the touch of her hand.
Which god was worshipped here, she did not know, nor did it matter. This was a holy place. Avaryan’s temple would be full tonight, with the god’s heir in the town, and the high priest from Endros come to sing the rite. Few people lingered here. A woman with a gift of fruit and flowers for the altar in the outer court. A circle of boys reciting lessons in front of their teacher. No priest that she could see, and no priestess.
The inner court would have been closed once to one of her sex. Maybe it was still. She did not care. The torque about her neck was passport to any temple in this world, even to the sanctuary, where the god’s secrets were kept.
She did not need to go so far. This was a local god, perhaps, or goddess: it was hard to tell. The image above the altar was carved of wood black with age, clothed in robe upon robe of improbable, royal richness, and crowned and necklaced and garlanded with flowers. Its face was a mask of beaten gold, neither male nor female, blank, serene, unreachably beautiful. It had no eyes, only darkness. Its mouth smiled just perceptibly.
Here, she thought, was Asanion: a golden mask, an androgyne smile.
Strange how little it repelled her, or even frightened her. Maybe she had lost fear with the capacity to love, or in truth to feel anything at all.
She sat cross-legged on the floor. It was swept clean, she noticed, and sprinkled with scented water. Somewhere in the temple’s depths, then, were priests with a care for th
eir duty. She was aware of them now that she stretched her senses.
What she was looking for, she did not know. She had been led here as she had been led to Endros from the breast of the sea. The god’s hand was light on her but firm.
It did not ease the bleakness in her belly. Nothing could do that.
She let her body settle, her power open like a sail to catch the magewinds. They were treacherous here amid the crowding of so many minds, on land so long subdued that it hardly knew itself apart from the men who lived on it. And yet the winds were there, gusting and circling.
Voices. Mageborne, she thought; then shadows fell across the light. She was not visible, maybe: dark trousers, dark coat, dark cap, sitting motionless in shadow.
They spoke Asanian softly, barely above a whisper.
“It is so?”
“It is so.”
Men’s voices both. The first was hesitant, the second eager—she would have said exultant. The eager one went on almost too fast to follow. “Oh, it is so! Out of the darkness he is come, the golden one, the Lion’s child.”
Estarion? Even in her half-trance, annoyance stabbed her. Could she never escape him?
“I don’t believe you,” the first voice said. “The yoke is heavier than it ever was. And now that one is come—the dark one. They say he has the eyes, but his face is a barbarian’s face, like a black eagle. An army rides with him; the high ones bow down to him. How can any power free us from him?”
“Easily,” said the second. “As easily as a knife in the dark.”
“Not this time. They were innocents before. Now they know. They feel the hate we bear them.”
“They are mages, too. And little good it does them. He is coming. He will strike them down.”
“With what? Sorcery?”
Scorn, that, and a flash of fear. The second voice laughed. It was higher than the first, perhaps younger, and something in it spoke to Vanyi of more than simple courage: wine or dreamsmoke, or darker things. “He needs none of their sorcery. He is. He will throw down the false king and rule as the old emperors ruled, true blood and true spirit. No bearded barbarian mocking the throne of the Lion.”
“You’re dreaming. What did you get into this time?”
“Truth!” sang the younger man. “I saw him. Very well, if you insist—in my dream. But the prophecy is true. The time is come. The burning god will fall, and the Golden Empire win back its own again. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you hear it? It’s coming—it’s almost upon us.”
“I hear the same old wishful wheezes I’ve always heard,” the first voice said. “It’s been, what? Fourscore years? Five? We’re as strong under the yoke as we ever were. And now the black king is here. All the high ones fall in front of him. If there is a Prophet—and I admit it, I’ve heard people talking, too—what is he but a madman? We’ve had those before. They never came to anything but a head on a spike.”
“This one is different,” the young one said. “You’ll see.”
“I’ll see him strung up for the crows,” the older man said. He sounded ineffably tired, but behind the voice was a spark of hope: that Estarion would fall; that this prophet, whatever he was—dream, delusion, living lunatic—would set Asanion free.
Vanyi drew a careful breath. They still had not seen her. The young one went away singing to himself. The elder—and he was old, she saw as he moved into the light, an ancient yellowed creature in a priest’s threadbare robe, with a broom in his hands—the old man kept silent but for the singing in his mind. The same song in both, wordless, wandering, but full of hatred for the invaders out of Keruvarion. It was worn so smooth, cherished so long, that it gleamed like a bloodstone in water.
She drew shadows about herself. Even so, she thought that the old man sensed her presence as the very old can, or the blind, by other senses than sight.
He tensed, peering. She made herself nothing, no one, wind and shifting air.
o0o
It took all the courage she had to walk to that guarded door, to say to the men there, “I would speak with his majesty.”
Men? They were boys, youths whom she knew, who smiled at her and asked after her. Was she well again?
“We worried,” said the slim brown boy from the Nine Cities. “He’s going to be glad to see you. All those simpering yellow women are giving him the jaundice.”
She burst out laughing, though she had thought there could be no lightness in her. “And of course no one can tell, he being what he is.”
The other guard, a hulking lad from somewhere north of Ianon, grinned blindingly. “We won’t tell him you said that. Go on, he’s waiting for you.”
o0o
Vanyi halted in the doorway of the inner chamber, stiff as a hound at gaze. At first she could not see him for the cloud of veils and perfumes and golden eyes. There must have been a dozen of them, and a fat personage beaming at them all and proclaiming in a voice much too sweet to be natural, “Oh, what joy! What delight!”
“Out.” That voice at least was unmistakable. It had a growl in it. “Out, I said!”
“But,” said the personage. “Majesty. They came all this way—all the way from Kundri’j, purely for your majesty’s pleasure.”
“Then let them go back to Kundri’j and give pleasure to men who want it.” Estarion rose up out of the veils, his eyes hot gold with fury, and the raw edge of it in his voice. “And tell his gracious lordship—tell him to pay your full fee. Doubled.”
“Trebled,” fluted the personage, “with additions for our hardship. To come so far for so little—the roads, the inns, the brigands—”
“Out!”
“Well roared,” said Vanyi dryly in the ringing silence.
Estarion stopped sucking in breath, stopped moving at all. He stared at her as if he had never seen her before. “Vanyi?”
“So I was, the last time I looked.”
“Vanyi!”
He was on her before she could stop him, arms about her, stronger than she remembered, whirling her in a dizzying dance. “Oh, love! Oh, lady! You don’t know—”
Her mind set itself to go rigid, to fight free. But her body had other intentions. Her arms knew precisely where to go. Her lips knew what they wanted, which was to silence him. The taste of him was piercing sweet.
She pulled back so abruptly that he staggered. He looked as drunken as the youth in the temple. Her hands smoothed his hair back from his face, combed through the curls of his beard, clenched at her sides. “This isn’t what I meant,” she said.
He blinked. He was always the slower to come to himself. “Damn those boys to everlasting hells. Bless them for sainted idiots. Among the three of you, you saved me from a fate worse than death.”
“What was so terrible about it? All those ladies need is a bath and a few days in the saddle, to make them halfway human.”
“Not my saddle,” he said with honest desperation. “Vanyi, beloved, whatever I said, whatever I did—”
“I didn’t come here to forgive you,” she said, so sharp that she brought him up short.
“But—”
“You can’t be anything other than you are. I won’t ask you to be. And you shouldn’t ask me to do what I can’t do. I can’t be your empress, Starion. I’ve known that from the beginning.”
“You have not.” The giddiness was gone. Estarion was Estarion again, and ready for battle.
She forestalled him. “No, Starion. No fights. Not now. I came—” Her voice died. “I came as your priestess. As your servant. Will you listen?”
He did not want to: it was transparent in his face. But he had his training. “I will listen,” he said, so tight that she could barely hear him.
She told him. The temple; the voices. The prophet they spoke of.
“Nonsense,” he said as the old man had, in very nearly the same tone. “People are always talking. And the boy was drugged, you say. Demented. It’s nothing but Asanion, being Asanion.”
“No,” said Vanyi. The power mov
ed in her. She opened it to him, willing him to see as she saw, fear as she feared.
He would not. “Even if there is substance in it, what difference can it make? I’m guarded day and night. I’m watched over like an infant. I can’t even visit the privy without someone peering over my shoulder.”
“You still don’t believe,” she said. “No one does. Your guards let me in with cries of delight. What if I’d been got at by someone with a gift for sorcery? I could have sunk a knife in you while you whirled me round the room, or poisoned you with my kiss.”
“Not you,” he said, so sure of her and of himself that she wanted to shake him. “You do love me still. In spite of everything.”
“I’ll never stop loving you!”
She clamped her mouth shut. He had enough sense, for once, not to reach for her. Maybe he was too stunned by the force of her outcry.
“Estarion,” she said after a long moment, in the steadiest voice she could manage. “Do this one thing for me. Trust what I see. Trust nothing else, not even yourself.”
“I can do that without your bidding. Asanion does it to me.”
“Then let it. You aren’t loved here, Estarion. Maybe you can witch them into it—you’ve the gift, I won’t deny it. But the hate runs deep, and it runs strong. They’ll have their prophet if they have to make him themselves. They’ll do all they can to destroy you.”
“I knew that when I was in my cradle. You’re forgetting, dear love. I’ve seen what they can do to me and mine.”
She shut her eyes and pressed her fists against them. Tears burned, too hot to shed. “Damn you, Starion. Why can’t you be as easy to hate as they think you are?”
“They don’t know me.”
Her fists dropped. She glared. “You arrogant—”
He seemed not to have heard her. “What can any of them do to me that I haven’t suffered already? Kill me? Then the god will take me.”
“They can leave this empire without its emperor, destroy your kin and everything you love, roll over Keruvarion and crush it with bitter steel.”
